Nostalgia, homesickness and emotional formation on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour

Abstract

The first recorded medical diagnosis of nostalgia-an extreme form of homesickness-was published in 1688 by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer. The sufferer was a young man from Berne who was studying in Basel. After "suffering from sadness for a considerable time" and unresponsive to medical interventions, he lay feverish, "weak and dying". He only began to recover when he was told he might return home. Home acted as such a powerful remedy that "he was restored to his whole sane self" before he even completed his journey. 1 Since the publication of Hofer's thesis, nostalgia and its emotional sibling, homesickness, has been discussed by contemporaries and scholars in the context of medical and Enlightenment discourses and in relation to the Swiss, migrants and lower social groups, including soldiers, servants and slaves. 2 Despite Hofer's assertion that nostalgia most commonly affected "young people and adolescents sent to foreign regions", little has been said about the most common category of young travellers in this period: the educational traveller. 3 This article begins to rectify this oversight by examining one

Appreciative joy, nostalgia and prosocial behavior: a different approach on mental wellbeing maintenance

“…Interestingly, before the 20th century, nostalgia is considered as a psychological illness, psychiatric disorder, or medical disease; but only after in the late 20th century, it is considered as a fond memory of self and others that is psychologically nourishing and energizing [20]. The word nostalgia comes from a combination of two Greek words: where nóstos means return home or homecoming and álgia means pain or suffering [21]. In the past, nostalgia is often referred to as an 'illness' for people who are suffering from being away from home by their strong desire to return home.…”